Contemporary online marketplaces are able to offer a wide variety of groups or types of items (including goods, services, information and/or media of any type or form) to customers who may be located in virtually any area of the globe, in any number of ways. Such items may be delivered to a fulfillment center or other facility operated by or on behalf of the online marketplace in inbound shipments from one or more sellers, vendors, manufacturers or other sources, or from another fulfillment center.
Items that are to be made available for purchase via an online marketplace may be delivered to a fulfillment center in any number of containers of any type, including but not limited to bags, boxes, cartons, envelopes or tubes, which may be closed with any form of sealant, layer or adhesive agent. When an inbound shipment of items arrives at a fulfillment center, e.g., by car, van, truck, train, ship or aircraft, the containers included in the shipment are received at a receiving station and recognized or registered using one or more computer systems, such as by scanning or reading one or more bar codes or other marked identifiers on external surfaces of the containers. The containers may then be either transported to a designated storage area or facility, so that the items contained therein may be placed into storage, or “cross-docked” to a distribution station, so that the items contained therein may be readied for prompt delivery to customers.
Within a fulfillment center environment, containers of items are typically transported from a receiving station to a storage area or a distribution station by way of a conveying system that includes one or more conveyors (e.g., belts or rollers). In most situations, when a container reaches its ultimate destination, a human operator must manually open the container, remove the items from the container and deposit the items in a designated location at the ultimate destination, e.g., into a designated storage vessel, or onto a preparation table where the items may be prepared for delivery.
A modern fulfillment center may be designed to receive inbound shipments that include tens of thousands of individual containers on a daily basis, and at high rates of speed. Typically, the most arduous and time-consuming task associated with receiving items at a fulfillment center involves the opening of such containers. For example, where items arrive at a fulfillment center in a cardboard box, the shipping or packing tape joining two or more flaps of the cardboard box must be torn or slit by a human operator using his or her bare hands or a handheld tool, e.g., a utility knife or other cutting apparatus, before the items may be removed therefrom. In view of the number of inbound shipments that arrive at a fulfillment center each day, the seemingly simple manual act of opening a container represents an impediment to productivity that may not presently be overcome by existing systems or methods for receiving inbound shipments.